One of the problems building scale models of aircraft of this era is trying to find suitable colour photographs. Finding a suitable aircraft in a museum is the ideal but, in the case of the Sealand, there seem to be relatively few surviving examples. One is IN-106 in the Naval Aviation Museam in Goa, in Indian Navy colours. Another is in Belgrade outside the Museum of Yugoslav Aviation, and there is a third example undergoing restoration at the Ulster Folk and Transport museum.
I didn't find any pictures on the web of the one in Ulster but the other two are fairly uninspiring colour schemes and I really did want to base my model on a civilian example. Further searching brought up some black and white photographs of what looked like more colourful specimens - see below.
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 But, promising though these colour schemes looked, there remained the problem of just what the colours were. During my searches, I came across the A. J. Jackson Collection of British Aviation archive material, which is housed at the Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, Surrey, England. After an exchange of e-mails, I arranged to meet up with David Jackson at Brooklands to see what we could find in the collection about the Sealand.
Meanwhile, in an idle moment, I did yet another web search and came across a link to an item for sale on e-bay. This turned out to be a print from a poster, depicting a Sealand in splendid red and white colours! I ordered it straight away.
Although the registration of the aircraft in the poster is not legible, the colour scheme seems to match that of G-AKLO pictured above right.When I met up with David Jackson we found that G-AKLM, pictured above left, crashed while on a sales tour in Norway in 1949. G-AKLO was also a sales demonstration aircraft and later, together with G-AKLP, was sold to Shell Borneo and re-registered VR-SDS.
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After spending a happy hour browsing David's collection of photos, I ordered the two shown here which, together with the colour poster, provided enough information for me to finish the model in the sales demonstration colour scheme. These photos make it clear that there is a white "cheat line" between the two main colour areas, from which we concluded that the flying surfaces and lower hull were aluminium not white, as suggested by the painting. Even though I never had any intentions of producing a high-fidelity scale model, it is nonetheless so much more satisfying to know that the finished scheme is at least representative of a real aircraft.
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